False Economy - Alan Beattie [131]
Along with disillusionment with the performance of a corrupt regime must go the belief that a new system will actually be an improvement, fulfilling all the functions of the original and more. Reform is not always straightforward, and it is certainly not always cheap.
The shift to a professional civil service in the United States is a case in point. The United States developed into a vigorous democracy in the nineteenth century, at least for those white men who were allowed to vote. In the years after the Civil War ended in 1865, turnout at elections averaged 80 percent of eligible voters, well above today's levels. But it was not always civic duty that brought people to the polling station. A good number either had been bribed to vote or were after a job from the winner.
The United States had been conceived as a decentralized agrarian republic. It was put together by a collection of states suspicious both of each other and of concentrated power. It had little conception of how to cope with becoming a powerful urbanized nation with the active federal government needed to regulate a complex industrialized economy. For a start, it did not have a strong central bureaucracy. Beginning with the administration of Andrew Jackson, elected president in 1828 and the first to come from outside the East Coast elite tradition of the Founding Fathers, American government operated on a "spoils" system, with government jobs handed out to supporters of the ruling party. Similar systems existed at state and local levels, which helps explain the rise of the corrupt but highly organized urban political machines that are still a feature of U.S. city politics.
One of the most widespread and long-lasting corrupt uses of public office was the postal system. Post offices functioned not just to distribute private mail but as circulation centers for newspapers, which were at this time highly partisan and acted largely as mouthpieces for political parties. The local postmaster was a figure of considerable political heft. (This role of the postal system as a form of political patronage, incidentally, has endured in Japan into the twenty-first century: the Japanese postal bank is the biggest savings system on earth, and bosses from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party have long used it to fund pet projects.)
Eventually, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and in line with several European countries, the American civil service was professionalized and depoliticized. But it took several decades of campaigning to get it done, with voters having to overcome their instinctive suspicion of swelling federal bureaucracies. And along with the decline of the spoils system came a drop in election turnout, which averaged only around 60 percent between 1920 and 1948. The spoils system may have been a corrupt, inefficient form of administration, but it made for a lively democracy.
Moving from a corrupt self-enriching bureaucracy to a professional, unbiased one can be expensive. In any system where public office is routinely used as a position to extract illicit bribes, the official remuneration for that office, as in China during the imperial period, is frequently low. Honest civil servants need to be paid well. I have heard it said by Africans that the first thing their governments need to do to improve administration and tackle corruption is to sack half the civil service and double the pay of the remainder. This, though, is one of the reasons that reforming a corrupt bureaucracy is politically as well as managerially difficult. It is a tough sell, to say the least, to announce to taxpayers that civil servants are on the take and that they therefore need to be paid a lot more, or that political parties are illicitly peddling influence and that they therefore need to be funded by the state. (Maintaining the prestige part of remuneration for public office can be relatively cheap and easy, as evinced by the regular conveyor-belt